2000: The Year the Courts Decided the Election

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o the method of recounts to the actual legality of proceeding with the counting of ballots. It looked as if the country would not have a president in the normal time frame it had come to expect. As then-President Bill Clinton said, “The people of America have spoken. It’ll just take us some time to figure out exactly what they said.”
In this tightly held race, every action was followed by a lawsuit. When canvassing boards did recounts, the Bush team lobbied to stop them. When these boards stopped their recounts, the Gore team lobbied to have them restarted. With the Florida statute vesting so much discretion in the hands of the canvassing boards and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the methods and legality of the recounts came into question. Also, with so much dispute over legalities, it was improbable that a concrete, much less impartial, decision could be made by the officials held by the two parties contending for the election. The only recourse seemed to be to leave the battles to the respective legal teams. In such a case, it is unlikely that a resolution could have been reached without intervention of the courts.
A natural question that arises in this scenario pertains to whether the courts are the proper forum for election disputes. The matter of the Florida courts’ involvement was a natural proliferation of Florida statute. Under Florida law, any candidate can file protest, any voter can bring a contest lawsuit over an election fo...